


don't you want to share the guilt?

by mybffwonderwoman



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst and Humor, F/M, No Murders, POV Karen Page, Post-Season/Series 02, Wine-Induced Self-Knowledge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-18
Updated: 2016-10-18
Packaged: 2018-08-23 04:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8313529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mybffwonderwoman/pseuds/mybffwonderwoman
Summary: Karen writes, she perseveres, she drinks her fair share of wine, and she does her part to keep the neighborhood safe on New Year's.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this was originally intended to be a much longer something, but I figured it was better to post a shorter something than nothing at all. xoxo to @cmc for being willing to read my junk. hers is infinitely better.
> 
> title from the song by kate nash.

He T-bones her car, he saves her life, he tells her that he’s already dead.

Okay.

She gets kidnapped, she watches a man get his foot half sawed off over her stupid save-the-day idea, the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen acts like he knows her, like he cares for her (pretty sure you don’t stroke the face of a stranger) and she feels a knot in her stomach grow. She feels like she’s about to know something she doesn’t want to know.

He paints a skull on a black tee shirt like he’s in a Symbolism 101 class and he goes out and shoots a bunch of people that have nothing to do with him to save Red’s ass. To cancel a debt?

She sees him on the rooftop. Was that an accident or did he let her? Was that why he came there all along?

She writes her first story for Ellison on Christmas Eve. Ellison laughs when it hits his inbox. _This isn’t slam poetry night, Karen. I like the spirit of it, though. Keep pushing._ So she’ll have a little more news context, a little less meditation next time. She’ll count the general encouragement as a win. (She takes her wins where she can get them.)

He torches his family’s house. Or at least she assumes he does. Isn’t everyone else who would want to destroy that stuff dead? She has the dubious pleasure of writing a blurb about it for the paper but she keeps her speculations to herself.

She keeps everything to herself these days.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

New Year’s Eve, Matt texts her. Asks to see her at their old offices. It seems like kind of a dramatic gesture but she doesn’t really have a read on him these days so maybe subtlety’s no longer in his wheelhouse.

She decides to show. She makes sure she looks really good. (Not like she’s not already a judicious dresser but she wants to hit that perfect balance of achingly beautiful and chillingly professional.) She makes sure she’s there really early, too. It would be so nice to have the drop on him. Just once.

He enters the room and there they are again– Matt looking like shit, slogging that twenty-five pound bag of guilt on his back, her on the outside, wanting badly to help patch him up and knowing how much helping him will cost her.

He says that he needs to show her something. (God, there’s not opt-out on this thing, is there.)

He says that he’s Daredevil.

That’s it.

Not, _I’m Daredevil and here’s why_. Not _I’m Daredevil– Karen, I’m so sorry_. Just a simple declarative sentence.

There’s no good way to reply.

There was a version of Karen that would have cried at his, just full-on wept from this incredible cocktail of relief and burning anger and disbelief, but she’s tired of crying over men telling her their secrets. Tired of crying in dark rooms, under circumstances beyond her control.

What should she say– _Did Foggy know?_ Of course he did. Shit, another person she has to be mad at, if she can muster the strength. The energy.

She wants to be cutting, maybe, snarky– _Jesus Christ, talk about a New Year, New You mentality, Matthew_ – but she’s not sure she’d get the cadence right and the last thing she wants to do is look more foolish than she already does.

So she just says, “Okay.”

He keeps looking at her with such expectation so she adds the only assurance she can think of.

“I won’t write anything about it in _The Bulletin_.”

It’s obviously not the reaction he was looking for, but it will have to be enough. It’s New Year’s Eve and she has other shit to do.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………

 

The other shit she has to do is watch the incredible film, _New Year’s Eve_ , in the comfort of her own home. Comfort being a negligible term given that everything she owns got shot to hell a couple of months ago and her landlord has been dragging his feet when it comes to spackling over the bullet holes.

It’s an Olivia Pope night, which is a fancy way of saying her dinner is red wine and popcorn and she, too, has garbage taste in men. That’s the explanation here, surely, for her hastily terminated romance with Matt and his relentless martyrdom and relentless lies, for her slowly dying friendship with Foggy and his complicity with all of the above.

That’s the explanation for why again and again she catches herself staring absentmindedly at the precise place on her hard wood floor where Frank Castle covered her with his body in a flurry of machine gun fire.

Sure.

God, this is a terrible movie. She always forgets. She just always remembers it doesn’t have any murders in it and that’s a good enough enticement for her these days.

She wonders if Frank has seen it. Or _When Harry Met Sally_. _While You Were Sleeping_. _The Proposal?_ She feels like he has. You have to have seen your fair share of rom-coms to dole out romantic advice as confidently as he did in that diner.

Not that he was right. She wasn’t in love with Matt. Right? (Who cares.)

Did Frank’s wife like these kinds of movies?

Wow, she has a pretty remarkable skill for killing her own vibe.

Time for a second bottle of wine. (And it’s not really a whole second one, okay– the first one was halfway done when she started.) She pads across the floor, across The Spot Where She Almost Died, to the kitchen. She’s fishing the corkscrew out of her odds-and-ends drawer when she glances out her window.

It’s nice. Not the view of course– she couldn’t afford an apartment with a genuinely nice view– but all the lights. The sounds of celebration drifting in. What is it, two minutes to midnight? She scans the rooftops for neighbors throwing parties, trying to get a glimpse of the Ball dropping, but there’s not really anyone but some guy–

Um.

He’s not facing her, actually. He’s pretty far away, silhouetted against a lit-up night, but she can clock that particular pair of broad shoulders from any distance and how many people spend their New Year’s on a roof with a sniper rifle?

Honestly, who murders someone on New Year’s Eve?

Someone whose only job is murdering people, I guess.

Oh my god, if his only job is murder but nobody’s paying him, how is he paying rent?

She has been good. She has been so good. About following her word. About compartmentalizing. She said he was dead to her if he killed that man and he killed him and he’s dead to her and she doesn’t think about him and she doesn’t wonder where’s he’s living, what apartment he’s squatting in, if he’s got proper heating in what has been a particularly brutal winter, if he can pay for dog food– she heard about a dog from Matt, so of course, she’s been very busy NOT worrying about the dog and if he’s been getting enough long walks now that his owner’s legally a dead man. 

Okay, so she’s been bad.

But she hasn’t gone looking for him.

Why? She cannot tolerate murder.

No, that’s a lie, she definitely can.

She doesn’t _like_ murder. She gets the certain satisfaction and the cold clarity and the moment where you step through your fear into something like power. But she also gets the nightmares and the humid, claustrophobic guilt and the fact that it never actually ends anything. 

She doesn’t like murder and he’s literally right about to commit one in her neighborhood.

(Does he know he’s so close her apartment? She flatters herself he wouldn’t forget her address.)

She has a vision of trying to reroute his life path– wait, she doesn’t need to imagine that, she tried that already. That was her, walking away from a car accident, bleeding, trying to save the life of a truly garbage person who, let’s not forget(!), had been about to kill her, using the only paltry bargaining chip she had– her friendship? And failing. Just absolutely crashing and burning in a way that, had it not been a literal life and death situation, would have felt suspiciously related to the way the nerdy girl feels when she gets the brush off from the most popular boy in school a third of the way thru a teen drama–

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh, wine-induced moment of self-knowledge.

If she is deeply and utterly frank with herself (ha ha), she knows something. She sure as shit didn’t stand in the middle of a dark road in the middle of the night _crying_ because Colonel Ray Schoonover got shot in the head.

She had wanted in some small, weird, self-indulgent, disgustingly romantic (y i k e s at that word coming into her head) way for Frank to pick her. Pick her over guns and revenge and an all black wardrobe and a scary codename.

And he didn’t, so she’s mad and sad and she really doesn’t want to have to report on a New Year’s Eve shooting happening two blocks away from her building (because Ellison _will_ assign it to her) and what is she going to do? Wave her arms in a window and get his attention?

Oh my god, she’s so dumb. The answer’s right in front of her. She has bad musical taste and a speaker system she can plug her phone into.

The moment she hoists up the window and presses play, she has a pretty potent mental image of her heating bill skyrocketing (because she’s letting a lot of fucking freezing air in) and her downstairs neighbors leaving her an awe-inspiringly passive aggressive Post-it note on her door tomorrow morning (because not everyone wants to hear funk at midnight, Karen), but she also immediately knows it is worth it because it’s not every day you see a grown man stop dead in his tracks over Earth, Wind & Fire.

The silhouette of the man on the rooftop looks up from his large and deeply frightening gun. He looks in her direction (she can’t see his face so she just hopes to god he’s sending her the same smile she saw across that diner table after fifteen cups of black coffee) and looks back at his gun. He looks off in the direction of whomever he was planning on shooting.

Is that a shrug of the shoulder she can see from 1800 feet away?

The silhouette of the man on the rooftop carefully and methodically breaks down the gun, packs it up, and heads down the fire escape and out of sight.

She smiles, because she’s standing there listening to a cheesy song, right? And because she did one good thing. She spoiled a perfectly good murder.

She lets the whole song play, and the next one, too, before she closes the window and returns to the sanctity of her only slightly bullet-riddled couch. (She’s going to list it as “gently grazed by flying projectiles” when she eventually posts it on craigslist.)

She manages to feel truly good about her decision for a whole five minutes before she starts to actually think about it. 

Did she actually successfully use non-violent means to stop The Punisher from murdering someone? What if the person he was going to murder is super, super, like, toilet-level terrible and that guy ends up murdering _her_? Would Frank extra-murder someone who murdered her? Will Frank just murder her himself so she stops interfering with all his murders?

She needs roughly seventeen more bottles of wine to help her work through this and she’s pretty sure all the bodegas in a two-block radius (realistically the distance she is willing to travel right now) are closed right now.

She’s unlocking her phone so she can see if you can order alcohol through Seamless when there’s a knock on the door. She feels her heart pause and then restart with a burst of adrenaline and she wonders vaguely how many more scares she can take in her life before she just goes ahead and keels over from the emotional strain.

It’s, what? 12:07 a.m. on New Year’s Day? It’s literally either a murderer or her downstairs neighbor here to put the kibosh on “Shining Star”. Or Matt. Oh my god, if it’s Matt, she’s going to kill herself.

She opens the door.

It’s a murderer.

Frank.

There are sixteen-and-a-half things she wants to say to him: you’re not dead/who were you just trying to kill/do you know about Matt too/did you save anything out of your house before you torched it/you’re not dead you know/I’m so mad at you/I’m so grateful to you/your tee shirt is stupid/you’re really not dead/I didn’t know if you were dead/why did you ever say anything nice to me if you were just going to leave/do you think you are different from me/you’re not dead/do you think you are worse than me/you’re not dead/did you know I’m a murderer too

She actually says: “Hi.”

He smiles.

He’s never seen her out of office clothes. He’s never seen her with her hair up and with ever-so-slightly wine-purpled lips. He’s never seen her warm and at home and not glancing over her shoulder looking for someone trying to hurt her. He’s never seen her standing still.

He just says: “Ma’am.”


End file.
